Welcome to the 15th anniversary Edition

CTM 2014 – Dis Continuity

CTM turns 15! In a 10-day celebration through new, forgotten, and unknown realms of adventurous music and sound CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art celebrates 15 editions in which has accompanied and fostered contemporary musical production. In 2014, we once again hope to present a programme full of contrasts, one more open than ever before to a broad range of music, beyond the carefully drawn borders of individual genres, styles, formats, and traditions. 

CTM 2014 Theme

Dis Continuity

CTM Festival’s 15th edition attempts to explore and map fragments of an alternative or neglected history of electronic and experimental music that still waits to be fully written. Under the title Dis Continuity, the festival will highlight select trajectories of past artistic experimentation, protagonists, and movements offside well-beaten paths, and explore how their ideas have evolved throughout different generations of artists, into the present – or how, when arising in an unreceptive or even antagonistic environment, their ideas were ignored, suppressed, sometimes even purposely destroyed, and eventually forgotten.

Resources

CTM 2014 Tumblr

The new CTM Festival Tumblr page will publish archived material from previous CTM Festival editions, as well as audio, articles, photos, and video connected to the 2014 festival theme, Dis Continuity.

Documentation

CTM 2014 Press Reviews

A selection of CTM 2014 reviews of that can be found on the internet.

Documentation

CTM 2014 in Sound and Image

A selection of CTM 2014 reviews of that can be found on the internet.

CTM 2014 Trailer

Documentation

CTM 2014 Live Gallery

Follow the festival – new photos added daily by our photographers.

CTM 2014 Dis Continuity Magazine

A special 15th anniversary publication that explores select trajectories in experimental and electronic music.

Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in the Early 20th Century

Generation Z : ReNoise

The Generation Z: ReNoise exhibition assembles rare original early sound equipment and explores the fate of researchers, sound experimentalists, and inventors active during a Russian period of revolution, war, and dictatorship in the first decades of the last century.

Premiering in Berlin as part of the exhibition is ReNoise, exploring the unique proletarian amateur noise music culture that thrived in post-revolution Russia. 

A/V performances and workshop at the House of World Cultures

CTM / transmediale Collaborative Programme

The transmediale and CTM Festivals have once again co-curated a series of audiovisual performances at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt that includes a daytime workshop with Mat Dryhurst, performances by Dinos Chapman and Lucky Dragons, and a joint closing concert with Robert Henke. 

CTM and transmediale city-wide partner programme

Vorspiel 2014

Leading straight into CTM and transmediale festivals, Vorspiel takes place as a city-wide programme where a variety Berlin-based initiatives and venues invite the public to a series of exhibition openings, performances, interventions, artist talks, and special events all over the city. 

Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe

Sound Exchange

Sound Exchange began its search for the roots and current state of experimental music culture in Central and Eastern Europe in 2010, pursuing commonalities and singularities found within these regions and discussing their relationship with the international history of experimental music.

Aiming at rendering local lines of development visible again and encouraging artists to reconnect to these traditions, Sound Exchange produced a series of festivals, exhibitions and workshops in Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Germany and the Czech Republic, in close collaboration with local initiatives in each country. CTM 2014 presents some of the findings and achievements of the extensive project through a special condensed programme at the festival, and links it into further dialogue with parallel developments in Russia and the West.

Resident Advisor Feature by Jordan Rothlein

Charles Cohen: Synthesis and Context

Some of the most vital electronic music of late was recorded around 30 years ago by a little-known US artist named Charles Cohen. Resident Advisor's Jordan Rothlein traveled to his home in Philadelphia to hear his story.

Festival for Art and Digital Culture

transmediale 2014 – afterglow

The revolution is over. Welcome to the afterglow.The digital revolution was a dinner party but its afterglow is not. 

From 29 January to 2 February CTM' sister festival transmediale 2014 explores the post-digital moment of "afterglow" as a diagnosis of the current status of the digital hovering between 'trash and treasure'. afterglow conjures up the ambivalent state of digital culture, where what seems to remain from the digital revolution is a paradoxical nostalgia for the futuristic high-tech it once promised us but that is now crumbling in our hands. 

Taking place at the iconic House of World Cultures, a dense programme of conferences, screenings, workshops, an exhibition, and performances – some of which presented in collaboration with CTM – invite for critical debate and exchange. transmediale and CTM offer joint passes, that give access to the events of both festivals.

Label Focus

PAN

CTM 2014 includes a special focus on the PAN label. Founded in 2008, the label does not subscribe to a singular style; rather, it identifies unorthodox expressive voices from different generations, bringing them into dialogue and exploring their intersections and the ways they reference one another. Curated together with label head Bill Kouligas, PAN’s presence spans various events over the festival week.

Label Focus

Editions Mego

Independent record label Editions Mego was founded in 2006 by Peter Rehberg as a means of conserving a catalogue released via now-defunct experimental electronic music label, Mego. It has since tirelessly exhumed and published archival works as well new, unabashed experimentalists, presenting relevant and challenging entry points into a vast open landscape of experimental music while looking simultaneously forward and backward in time. CTM 2014 will pay tribute to Editions Mego’s ongoing explorations with a multipart programme that spans its various sublabels and recent releases.

The History of Electronic Music in the Netherlands

Kees Tazelaar, director of the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, will reconstruct the birth and evolution of electronic music in the Netherlands, which revolved around notable institutions such as the Philips Studios (which supported a laboratory of experimentation in sound and new technologies, assembling leading thinkers and researchers such as Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier, Dick Raaijmakers, and Edgard Varèse during the postwar period), the Art Science Interfaculty, and the Institute of Sonology. The latter two remain bustling creative laboratories for forward-thinking artists and projects today.

INA-GRM / Recollection GRM at CTM 2014

Groupe des recherches musicales

Founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1958, Paris-based Groupe de recherches musicales (INA-GRM) was one of several theoretical and experimental groups operating under the umbrella of the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française. Devoted to production and creation, the GRM remained based on practice, and could be summed up in the catch phrase "do and listen". Exploring Schaeffer’s ideas of musique concrète, acousmatic music, as well as other audible phenomena and music in general (including non-Western music), the GRM remains active today as a leading laboratory of sound experimentation that successfully connects to a younger generation of contemporary artists. The group has counted musicians such as Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, and the recently deceased Bernard Parmegiani among its members.

50 Years Elektronmusikstudion EMS

One of Europe’s foremost institutions of electronic music experimentation, the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2014. Created in 1964 as a studio for research and development within the Swedish National Swedish Radio, today the EMS is run independently by the Director Mats Lindström. Lindström will give an introductory talk on the history and current experimentation taking place at this important centre for musical innovation, as well as direct the multichannel diffusion of several seminal works produced at the studio, including Akós Rózmann's "Images of the Dream and the Death".

Focus on Erkki Kurenniemi

CTM 2014 pays homage to Finnish composer, designer, artist, technologist, and visionary Erkki Kurenniemi, whose work and ideas have set the stage for electronic music in Finland. A pioneer of digital music technology, his revolutionary DIMI synthesizers built in the 1970s are believed to represent the first completely digital synthesizers, with real-time capabilities, that were ever made. In collaboration with Helsinki’s Kiasma Museum and the electronic studio of the University of Helsinki, CTM 2014 presents a multi-part programme to shed light on the life and work of this idiosyncratic artist and inventor.

Adventurous Berlin Sound at CTM 2014

Berlin Current

Berlin Current is a collaborative initiative from CTM Festival, Berghain, Boiler Room Berlin, De:Bug, and BLN.FM, presenting and premiering new and adventurous configurations of pop music from young Berlin-based artists. Berlin Current artists to be featured at CTM 2014 include the disorienting cross-genre dance music of Lotic, industrial-inspired alchemistic duo OAKE, and the syncopated rhythms, dark atmospherics, and copious sub-bass of Phoebe Kiddo's sophisticated take on pop. Two specially commissioned projects by Owen Roberts and Kathy Alberici will also premiere at CTM 2014. 

Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis

n_polytope

"n_polytope: Behaviours in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis" is a spectacular light, sound, and architectural environment. The performance-installation by Chris Salter, in collaboration with Marije Baalman and Thomas Spier combines cutting-edge lighting, lasers, sound, and sensory and artificial intelligence software technologies inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’ radical 1960s-1970s works,  "Polytopes" (from the Greek poly, many and topos, space). 

Commissioned works

Radio Lab

The CTM Radio Lab at CTM 2014 is dedicated to exploration and experimentation within the medium of radio. The Lab programme features two projects commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur/Klangkunst, Goethe-Institut, ICAS – International Cities for Advanced Sound, ECAS – European Cities for Advanced Sound, and CTM Festival.

"Walk That Sound" by Lukatoyboy uses the commonplace yet often forgotten walkie-talkie to create a moving urban sound portrait based around Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

∏-node is an experimental platform for hybrid Web/FM radiophonic composition. As a multi-dimensional radio infrastructure platform, ∏-node explores the narrative, participative, and imaginary possibilities of radio through the use of both historic and new, digital technologies.